


To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

by silverspidertm2



Series: Short Hair [2]
Category: Berserk
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 13:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13637040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverspidertm2/pseuds/silverspidertm2
Summary: Griffith has a little chat with his inner child and discovers he's not as omniscient as he thought he was.





	To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Another repost from ff.net. This fic assumes everyone’s read up to and including volume 28, otherwise it might not make much sense. Can be read separately from “Short Hair” but will make more sense together given upcoming fics in this series. Enjoy and please review.

Gods do not need to sleep, so Griffith rarely did, but sometimes he would find himself wandering the vast halls of his memory palace when his mortal body required rest. It was an elaborate series of rooms with no set beginning of end. Every room was exactly the same shape and size, with only the artifacts within revealing the memories housed within.

The black and red apartments where the carpeting was soaked in blood and walls smeared with gore were from his years in the other world, his years as Femto. He was still Femto, he reasoned, even if his appearance resembled the leader of the old Band of the Hawk. In fact those rooms were easier to be in than the others.

The simpler ones were made of wood and stone and had natural, earthy colors. The largest of them was an armory with a verity of weapons in all shapes and sizes. On a wooden table, next to a sharpening stone lay a series of throwing knives, and a crossbow was propped up against one of the table legs. In the corner stood a giant war-hammer. Propped up on either side of the door were two swords; one small and delicate with something akin to a heart carved on the crest of the hilt, the other a huge piece of metal most men would not be able to lift let alone wield.

Griffith did his best to only pass those rooms out of necessity, on his way to another memory.

Every once in a while, he would feel a shadow lurking in the corners, but it would disappear every time he turned around to catch sight of it. It was alright though. Griffith knew this specter well enough, knew it posed no threat to him, the ever present vestige of a malformed child’s mind. Griffith’s memory rooms meant nothing to him, and the child had no consciousness to speak of so he could not build his own even if there were memories to place within them. Therefore, it was easier to leave him alone than to deal with his presence.

He had not seen him for months. Griffith even thought that perhaps the child’s mind had faded away to nothing, but one day he noticed a strange darkness in the westernmost point of the palace, the kind that meant a new room or wing was being constructed. Except he was not the one building it. Not a deformed creature, but a boy stood in front of the gap. A boy with long wild black hair and big black eyes that looked terribly familiar. He stared at Griffith wordlessly, and Griffith stared back.

“Still alive, I see,” he finally commented casually.

The boy frowned ever so slightly. “It’s my body.”

“So it is,” the god agreed, “but it’s also polite not to keep secrets from your guests.”

“You’re not a guest,” the boy objected. “You weren’t invite you. You just came.”

Griffith couldn’t help but smirk at the ferocity in the child’s voice. Again, a familiar feature, he decided. “Nevertheless, I am here.”

“You could always go away,” the boy suggested in that simple way that children have of proposing the most obvious solution to any problem.

“And you would go back to being that shapeless thing on the verge of death,” Griffith pointed out. “The current arrangement benefits both of us.”

The child said nothing. Griffith was also silent for a moment as well, then decided.

“Let me see what you’ve built.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t have the strength to deny me.”

“No,” the child agreed, “but I don’t want you to.”

Griffith paid the comment no attention as he veered around the boy and stepped into the darkness of the newly constructed memory room.

At first he couldn’t see anything. Even the space a foot ahead of him was covered in inky blackness. But soon enough Griffith heard the distant sound of ocean waves crashing on a beach and felt his boots slightly sink into the sand beneath his feet. The scene of a beach and vast ocean blending with the night sky unfolded before him. He briefly wondered if it was just a piece of the child’s imagination instead of a real memory, but then six figures appeared out of the darkness.

They were just obscure shadows at first, and Griffith realized with a measure of surprise that it was the child’s doing. The boy was deliberately trying to hide his memories from him, and it was actually working. The god’s perfectly shaped platinum brows drew together ever so slightly as he frowned down at him. The child paid him no mind.

With a wave of his hand, Griffith lifted the shadows that the boy cast over the figures. Two of them he instantly recognized and was not at all surprised to see. It was natural, after all, for the boy to be drawn to his parents. Griffith knew that he had visited both of them before their merger, while the child had been that premature contorted creature. But it was the presence of the other four that intrigued him. Where did the boy know them from? It wasn’t until he took a closer look at the image of his once-friend and saw that several strands of the man’s jet black hair were white, that Griffith finally understood.

“You saw them,” there was a note of disbelief in his usually calm, even voice. “You actually saw them since we joined, and you hid it from me.”

“Yes,” the boy lifted his chin in defiance. “I’m stronger than you think. I love my parents. I won’t let you hurt them.”

“You cannot dictate my actions,” the god declared.

“Are you sure?” asked the child. “You didn’t think I could do anything without you knowing about it either.”

Griffith felt himself being pushed out of the memory as the boy’s desire to remove him from it finally began to win. Turning on his heel, he proceeded back to his own memory palace, telling himself that it was his choice to return, not the boy’s insistence for him to go that made him retreat, but in the back of his mind, the god felt the seed of something he thought he buried forever with his former companions:

Fear.


End file.
